Complimentary Addictions: Pharmaceutical Experimentalism and the Problem of Recovery in Baltimore

ABSTRACT

In Baltimore, clients in methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) experiment with prescription medicine and in doing so face new risks of noncompliance as they tread this blurry line between medical and illegal. This can potentially lead to suspension from drug treatment programs, resulting in clients finding the next most suitable treatment center to enroll into. I argue that the close interaction between drug treatment centers and illegal markets results in new pharmaceutical dependencies, forms of self-care as well as suspicions toward, but also among clients, about their intentions to recover.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• Baltimore
• methadone
• recovery
• treatment center

Acknowledgments

I express my gratitude for the clients and addiction counselors who participated in the study and shared their perspectives. I also want to thank my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University especially in the school of public health, history of medicine and anthropology departments who helped me approach issues of drug use and recovery from a more critical perspective. I want to thank the editors and staff at Medical Anthropology, including James Staples, Rebecca Marsland and Victoria Team for facilitating the review of the manuscript. I am also grateful for the generous feedback provided by the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency.

Notes on contributors

Sanaullah Khan

Sanaullah Khan is a medical and psychiatric anthropologist. He is currently a lecturer in anthropology at Brandeis University.